Anti-gay gays

NIGEL ASHFORD

Bruce Bawer editor BEYOND QUEER Challenging gay Left orthodoxy 329pp New York Free Press $24 0684827662

ne of the most extraordinary cultural developments of the 1990s has been the emergence of the Gay Right identified in Britain with Matthew Parris the Times writer Dr David Starkey of the London School of Economics nomics and talk radio Michael Brown MP and TORCHE the Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality As with so many developments in gay politics and culture its origins are to be found in the United States Its intellectual birth can best be identified with the publication in 1993 of Bruce Bawer's A Place At the Table which was the first book openly to challenge the Left's hegemony of gay thought While it was widely discussed in the United States it had little impact in Britain Another challenge and one that reached a much wider British audience was Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal (1995 Both books met with hostility from two quite different directions the religious Right and the queer establishment The religious Right was horrified that gays should expect to receive equal treatment and recognition in mainstream society while the queer media were horrified that gays should want to be part of an oppressive heterosexual society Both consoled themselves with the idea that Bawer and Sullivan were unrepresentative fringe figures However there is growing evidence that they were only the most visible reflection of the politics values and behaviour of many perhaps most gays and that threatens the easy platitudes of both the religious Right and the queer Left Evidence can be found in Beyond Queer a volume of thirty-eight essays (mostly reprints by eighteen American gay and non-gay writers edited by Bawer a literary and film critic One immediate problem is what to call this group The term Gay Right is used more by their critics than by themselves The authors are an eclectic bunch we variously call ourselves liberals moderates libertarians and communitarians tarians - or eschew such labels as increasingly irrelevant (Would none describe himself as conservative What they have in common is a rejection of the domination of gay politics by the Left The queer Left rejects...